Piano Man
by Angeliz
Summary: Over the course of Marik's travels, he encounters an ivory pianist in a quiet tavern at the edge of an unnamed town. The music intrigues, as does the man, though it is not until the following year that he is able to realize why.


The sun was just setting in a blaze of gold and red as the traveler came over the hill, framed in the autumn light. Marik, he called himself, just Marik, for what need had a traveler of anything more? He had his cloak, patched and faded, and a few coins in his pocket from the oddest of jobs, and there was a town spread out before him. That was all he wanted in the world, besides perhaps a drink and a place to sit and listen.

Wind whipped playfully through his pale hair, warm in the sunlight but threatening frost by nightfall, and the traveler picked his way down the hillside path. There was a tavern at the edge of the town, the sort of place that held the same people night after night as they ran up their tabs and drank away their sorrows. It was there that he headed, away from the lights and throbbing bass of trendier clubs toward the square. A grizzled old man nodded at him in the gathering darkness, held the door open behind him. Marik gratefully stepped inside.

The room was dim at the edges but glowing somehow, with low lights on golden wood and the spirits of the regulars practically carved into their tables. Marik shed his cloak, letting the murmur of voices and the faint tinkling of music wash over his body, easing weary muscles.

"Evening," the bartender said, his voice like the low trill of a cello. "What can I do you for?"

Marik settled himself at the bar, lavender eyes smiling. "A beer, I think." His calloused fingers traced an abstract pattern on the surface before him, moving in time to the melody that floated through the room. A snatch of music caught his ear, familiar, and he cocked his head to one side to listen. "Haven't heard this song in a long time," he commented as the bartender slid his drink to his hand.

The man chuckled. "He's an odd one, our piano man. Doesn't say much. Just sits there and plays, plays 'til we close and disappears 'til we open again. Stories about him all over town, but nothing I's ever heard him say. Only know that he wandered in here five years ago looking lost and hasn't left since."

"They come that way," Marik agreed around a swig of his drink, and as one group of rowdy patrons moved from their table to the pool hall, he found himself with a perfect view of the piano man himself.

He _looked_ lost, that was for sure. Broken once, and it showed in his frail wrists, his deadened dark eyes. Fingers paler than the keys they danced over, hair like snow, with a young face in contrast to the unmistakable aura of the ancients. He had an old soul. It sounded through his music.

"Strange, isn't he."

"Hn."

The bartender wandered toward the other end of the counter where an older woman waited quietly, leaving Marik to his thoughts. The pianist _was_ strange, and not just because of his looks or the idle rumors that followed him in whispers. It was something about the way he held his hands over the keys, the way he didn't seem to notice his audience as he cast their emotions into tangibility. The way his eyes seemed to flicker, in and out of reality. And still the music played.

The song ended, though the music didn't stop, merely blended itself into the next flurry of notes, the same sad sweetness present in their tone. Broken, but talented. There was no doubt to that.

"Sing us a song, piano man," Marik found himself saying quietly, too quietly to be heard from the piano bench. It shocked him for a moment when the dark eyes locked onto his own, as if their owner had heard the murmured request. Then the eyes returned to dark wood and ivory keys, and Marik realized that he had moved closer, close enough to touch the man if not the music. The damned melody was hypnotizing.

_The melody or the man?_

A fair question, the traveler allowed, rather than brushing off his own unintended inquiry. The notes poured from the piano in a waterfall, sweeping its listeners into the current, but that was all figurative, auditory. The man was the sound made seeable. He was intriguing in his solitude.

The melody changed, a split second outlier, and Marik caught the taste of Egypt. His fingers slid against the glass, regaining their grip at the last moment, though a few drops of amber splashed over the edge. His eyes were intense on the piano man, but the dark gaze never strayed from the keys. He wondered if he had imagined it.

"No. I don't think so." He had been distracted by the white and pale and ivory, but there was Egypt in the man, as there was Egypt in him. It was there in his eyes. It was, apparently, there in his music. It was almost as if the man had spoken to him. The bond between two solitary travelers, far from home.

_Yes, they're sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone._

"True enough." Marik sipped at his beer, his words in response to the swell of the music. For some reason, the chatter of regulars had muted, moved away. Or perhaps it was he who had moved again. In wake of the songs spilling over his ears, he could not be entirely sure.

_It's been a long time._

"I don't recall having met you before."

_You aren't supposed to._

Marik toyed with his glass, dropping a coin into the jar on the counter. He wondered slightly at the fact that he was conversing with piano music, but it wasn't as if it were the strangest thing to ever happen to him. He had been wandering for a good five years, after all, and humans were an oddity. That much was constant, he was sure.

Still.

"Well. My name's Marik; what's yours?"

Fingers skipped, scrabbled for the correct keys. The regulars looked up instinctively. The piano man never hit a wrong note, never, not in the nearly six years they'd known his music. Strange, ever strange. Perhaps they had imagined it.

"You must have a name."

_What's in a name?_

Reluctance entered the traveler's voice, narrowing his lavender eyes. "I suppose." He dredged through his memory, checking and double checking, but there was nothing resembling the pale man before him. As far as he could remember, he had never even known anyone who could play the piano. "But if we _have_ met before, I certainly can't recall it."

The piano trilled. The music returned to its previous nature, beautiful but solitary. The man was done with him.

"I'll figure you out eventually."

Marik stood, paid for his drink, left a handful of coins in the jar on the piano. He knew, by some strange subconscious instinct, that he would get no more from the man before him. Maybe someday he would return, but for now, it was time to move on. It was going to be clear tonight, even if slightly chilled. A good night to travel by starlight.

"Headin' out, stranger?" called the bartender, rag twisting and turning within the depths of a glass. There was a touch of envy in his eyes, though it did not sour his smile. Marik recognized the emotion, having seen it often during his travels. They always wished they could leave, just pack up and be free. In their eyes, Marik was the embodiment of that latent desire. He brought it to the surface with his every departure.

"That I am. May stop back someday. It's a nice place you've got here."

"Appreciate it. Fair travels."

"Thank you."

The patched cloak swished, material faded like twilight, and Marik was through the door. The piano tinkled in the growing darkness.

---

A year passed. Marik's travels took him from England to everywhere, eventually depositing him in Egypt, where his sister urged him to get in touch with his friends in Japan. "You haven't talked to them in years," she had told him, and he supposed she had a point. So he agreed easily to cease her fretting; it took him a month or so of travel to cross a continent and catch a boat from the mainland, good time, he thought, as he eventually put into Kobe. From there it was a train ride to Tokyo, then a bus to Domino City.

Yugi, of course, was thrilled to see him; Yugi was always thrilled to see anyone at all. It was just the sort of person he was, all shy innocence and welcoming smile. The others were perhaps a bit more hesitant, Jou especially, but he recognized their reason and left them to it.

It surprised him how much they had changed, scattering and marrying and taking jobs. They were no longer the inexpert teens he had befriended so briefly in his younger years. Marik supposed it was stupid to think they would have stayed the same, but he had pictured them at seventeen or so for the entirety of his absence. It was familiar, and now it had changed. Life's seasons at work once more.

---

He had been with them for about a week when the memory returned.

They had been walking through the park in a group—Anzu, Honda, Yugi, Mokuba, and Shizuka; a different group than that of old, but they had molded themselves to the convenient—when a faint trill of piano song flitted through his mind. It was that same sad sweetness of the dusky tavern he had run across last autumn, and a vision of the ivory man immediately brushed his memory, carried on the melody. And suddenly, Marik had a name for him, and a history.

"Oh, gods…"

Marik's gaze shot to Yugi's; their eyes met with the sudden understanding. The others seemed only mildly affected, but the two magic-users were in the full throes of disenchantment, fragments of sound and image rushing through their minds with the freedom of a long-detained wave.

_Flickering images, like shards of glass. A stone, name carved into granite. Tears in the eyes of those who could shed them. Gray sky, tendrils of wispy cloud. A mysterious absence. Moonlight on ashen skin, colorless hair. The halfhearted chime of piano keys, each sounding alone rather than blending together. Dejection in dark eyes, soul suffocating in its solitude. "I have no reason to stay. He was all that held me."_

_A golden glow, warm, with licks of shadow dancing on its edge. "I'm leaving. You'll forget me. Forget him." The voice, low, breaking in the middle. Accented by the high, trickling notes under his fingers._

_A different voice, deep, understanding and disapproving. "The enchantment will lift with your death. Why?"_

_Deadened eyes, deadened words. The piano living, breathing beneath his hands. "I do not plan to outlive him by long."_

Then the memories took root, nestling into their places in his mind, and he could see the world again. It seemed too bright, too cheerful after the moonlight of so long ago, the night before he left. Though it was no coincidence, his departure, for he could remember now the reason. They had lost one of their own.

And now they had lost another.

Yugi turned away, supported by Honda's strength, his eyes searching out the Domino skyline, though his attention turned inward. From the sadness in his eyes, Marik knew he could not hear the music that echoed in his own head. The inexorable blending of keys, twenty fingers, dancing up and down across black and white.

"Sing us a song, piano man," Marik murmured, as his fingers gripped convulsively at the fraying hem of his cloak.


End file.
